You might think a DVD is a DVD and it will work on any DVD player, but you're wrong. Hollywood has segregated the world into seven "regions" and DVDs are generally encoded for playback in only one region. Ostensibly the studios do this because release dates differ in different regions of the world. For instance if a DVD comes out in the U.S. before the same movie is in the theatre in France, U.S. DVDs could hurt ticket sales of the movie in French theaters. Or at least that's what the studios claim. DVD region encoding exist primarily to solve a problem with a very poor distribution scheme that the studios have come up with. What's more there have been accusations that region encoding creates an illegal price-fixing structure that can be enforced by region. So far this argument hasn't made it in front of a court, but New Zealand has been lobbying heavily to eliminate region codes on price fixing grounds. As it stands, if you're on holiday in Paris and you pick up a copy of the new Harry Potter movie, when you get home you'll have yourself a nice $20+ coaster. But luckily region encoding isn't a complex process, in fact it's just a single bit at the beginning of the disc, which means it isn't hard to get around. ^^^^ Regions Before we get started here's a quick overview of the regions that Hollywood has come up with: * REGION 1 -- USA, Canada * REGION 2 -- Japan, Europe, South Africa, Middle East, Greenland * REGION 3 -- S.Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and parts of Southeast Asia * REGION 4 -- Australia, New Zealand, Latin America * REGION 5 -- Eastern Europe, Russia, India, Africa * REGION 6 -- China * REGION 7 -- Reserved for Unspecified Special Use * REGION 8 -- Reserved for cruise ships, airplanes and the like * REGION ALL -- Uncoded discs that will work anywhere ^^^^ Hardware solutions Perhaps the easiest way around region encodings is to just buy a region free player. A quick web search will turn up a number of manufacturers that have declined to accept Hollywood's region plans. But what if you've already got a nice DVD player or you want to use the disc on your PC? Well there are a number of hacks that you can use to turn off the region encoding in your DVD player. For a complete list check out "Video Help" or use the site to search for your DVD model to see if there's a solution available. Note that hacking your DVD player to circumvent region encoding technology is a violation of the DMCA, which means it's illegal if you're living in the United States. Those living in the free world, shouldn't have any trouble. ^^^^ Software If you live in the U.S. or if you simply want a solution that will work on any DVD player, even those that haven't been hacked, your best solution is to burn a copy of the movie. Fair Use provisions in U.S. law have long held that consumers can make backup copies of media they own. With that in mind, what you'll want to do is rip a copy of your DVD using one of the many popular ripping programs on the market (we suggest "ImgBurn" on Windows and "Mac The Ripper" for Mac). Make sure that you set the ripping software to produce a "region all" file and then, when you've got a copy on your hard drive, burn a new DVD using software like "Toast" (Mac) or "Nero" (Windows). The result will be a DVD that works as you would expect -- in any player anywhere. Well almost any player. There's one gotcha that might be a problem for some users, but there's little you can do about since it involves video playback. Keep in mind that PAL discs must be played in a PAL-compatible DVD players and NTSC discs must be played in an NTSC DVD player. In general the U.S. produces NTSC formatted video and the rest of the world uses PAL. There are some DVD players that can handle both so if you spend a lot of time outside the U.S. it might be worth spending some extra money to get a DVD player that can handle both formats.